


Wordplay

by Novaviis



Series: Watercolour [16]
Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Fluff and Humor, Foreign Language, Languages and Linguistics, M/M, Study Date, Teen Romance, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 18:08:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20800733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Novaviis/pseuds/Novaviis
Summary: When Dick is in danger of failing an English Grammar exam, Wally's attempt to help him study reveals the origin of his boyfriend's habit of deconstructing words in a way he hadn't expected.





	Wordplay

**Author's Note:**

> My take on Dick's tendency to play around with language. This is short and sweet and silly, but something I've wanted to do forever.

When Wally walked into the Cave’s common room that afternoon, safe to say the last thing he expected was to narrowly dodge a flying textbook. Reflexes kicking in before he’d even realized what he was doing, he ducked down fast. He felt the edge of the pages wisp by his hair as the book slammed into the concrete wall. When he stood up again, still processing what the hell had just happened, he was met with his enraged boyfriend sitting on the couch.

“Ooookay,” Wally looked between Dick and the text book on the ground, and back again. “What’d I do?” he asked with a cocked brow.

Dick groaned, the mortified expression on his face bleeding into resignation as he slumped down against the cushions. “Sorry, Wally.”

Stooping down to pick up the text book, Wally carried it with him into the living room. The coffee table was currently a mess of tomes, notebooks and sticky notes scattered around the surrounding couches. “Did I miss something?” he asked, pretty certain at this point it wasn’t something he did but erring on the side of caution. “Forget an important date, said something stupid? I really wouldn’t be surprised at this point but I’m sorry in advance.”

“It wasn’t anything you did,” Dick confessed with a long sigh. He leaned forward on the cushions, elbows on his knees as he pressed his fingers to his temples. “I’m gonna fail a class.”

“You?” Wally clarified, hoping his shock wasn’t showing on his face. From the side glare he received from Dick, it apparently was. “Failing a class? What could you possibly be failing?”

Dick didn’t reply. Resuming his temple massage, he waved with one hand and gestured to the book in his hands.

Turning the textbook over, Wally looked down at the cover. The pragmatic title “English Language: Advanced Grammar” scrolled across the top in imposing block letters. Not so much as a graphic art picture graces the dark red surface. “Ah,” Wally nodded as he cleared one of the notebooks from beside Dick and set it on the coffee table. “Graduate level Nonparametric Statistics are no sweat, but the Bard’s got you beat?”

Dick pushed back to slump against the cushions again, eyes drifting up to the ceiling, as Wally sat down next to him. “_Every fair from fair sometime declines_,” he quoted. “It’s not literature I have the problem with. It’s this whole _stupid_ language.”

“The one that you’re speaking... right now.”

“Yes, the one that I’m speaking _right now_,” Dick rolled his eyes. “I know English, I’ve been speaking it for most of my life. I have the vocabulary down, pronunciation, diction, all of that. It still just makes no _fucking_ sense!” With a great, heaving sigh, Dick sunk down further into the cushions and pressed his palms over his eyes. “I have an exam in a few days, and I’m already in bad graces with my teacher because apparently asking questions is disruptive to the rest of the class. She said I was ‘being a smart mouth’, but I was just curious! Not my fault she couldn’t answer me.”

Shifting toward his boyfriend, Wally set the Grammar textbook on the coffee table and opted to throw an arm around Dick. “Well, why don’t you ask Artemis or Barbara for help? Aren’t they in your class?”

“Not this one,” Dick said. “They’re not taking it until next semester, and they’ve got their own exams to study for right now. Meaning I’m doomed.”

Wally tried valiantly not to snicker at the dramatically hopeless lamenting of his boyfriend, and for the most part succeeded. He coughed into his fist in an attempt to hide his amusement before clapping Dick lightly on the shoulder. “C’mon, maybe I can help you with some of this. Can’t be that bad, can it?”

Dick only lifted his hands from his eyes to glare at him.

Wally lifted his hands in surrender. “Not what I meant,” he said. “I mean, between the two of us we should be able to figure this out.” Using his free hand to reach out, Wally picked up the text book again and set it down on his lap. There were a number of pages marked off with varying colours of sticky notes, each labeled with what would be covered on the exam and what he had the most difficulty with. “Here, let’s start with something easy. Prefixes.”

“Evil.”

This time, Wally couldn’t even try to fight down his laughter. “What?”

“Evil!” Dick shouted as he listed to the side and flopped across the sofa. “I’m not doing them, and you can’t make me.”

Wally pushed the text book aside, throwing himself on top of his boyfriend. “Hey, come on, you can’t give up on me yet!” he proclaimed as he poked Dick’s sides. “I ain’t quittin’ you!”

Dick struggled beneath Wally to wrestle himself free. “Prefixes are my personal nemesis! They don’t _fix_ anything! They exist only to give me a headache!”

Abruptly pausing his attack, Wally pushed himself up on his forearms and tilted his head down at Dick. “They’re called prefixes because they’re pre-fixed to the beginning of a word, dude. Even I know that one.” And, once more, Wally returned to tormenting him.

Dick twisted, finally managing to get on his back and shove Wally off. Even still, he was laughing, and Wally counted that as a victory in his book. Dick shook his head, pushing himself upright. “But that’s just the problem!” he argued. “Prefix, in itself, has a prefix, and it doesn’t follow it’s own logic!”

“How so?”

Dick’s eyes narrowed into a sharp glare. Wally, for the first time in a very long time, almost missed the days before Dick revealed his identity to the team. At least the sunglasses would have shielded him from the eye-murder his boyfriend was radiating right now. “What’s the opposite of Pre?” he asked in a level tone.

“Um...” Wally floundered (he knew the answer, but he also knew that he was probably about to say something that would set Dick off). “Post?”

“And what’s the opposite of a Prefix?”

“A Suffix.”

Dick flopped over again. Face buried in the couch and everything. Damn, this was really getting to him. Wally, this time, didn’t really know what to do. He was honestly half afraid Dick was on the verge of a mental breakdown. Either that, or he was going to get lightheaded from all this up-and-down _very_ fast.

“Babe?” Wally called out. “Earth to Dick?”

Voice muffled by the thick sofa cushion, Dick let out a long, tortured moan. “A Prefix is word attached to the beginning of another to adjust its meaning. The opposite of Pre-something is Post-something.... but a Suffix is the opposite of a Prefix. It should be called a Postfix!”

“Dick, I really don’t think it’s that deep,” Wally tried to reason with him. “It’s probably just some Latin thing.”

Rolling onto his back, Dick directed his frustration up at the ceiling again. “We’re not _speaking_ Latin, Wally. English is a Germanic language. Why are we using Latin in English?”

Wally shrugged. “I don’t know, ask the Romans.”

“Well, the Romans are dead and so is Latin,” Dick grumbled. “You can’t just take a bunch of spare grammar and lone words from other languages, throw it all into a big pot, and call it its own language.”

“Apparently you can. Supported by the fact that we’re speaking it right now.”

With another, drawn-out whine, Dick lifted his hands to scrub his palms down his face. “But it doesn’t make _sense_!” he cried. Dick pushed himself up, snatching the textbook off of Wally’s lap and flipping back to the page on the cursed Prefixes. “See, look at this!” he pointed to a chart laid out on the paper, listing different Prefixes, their meanings, and examples. “The Prefix “A” denotes that the word is “without” or “not”, right? Like an amoral decision is one made without consideration of a moral, and an Atheist is a person who doesn’t believe in any God while a Thiest does.”

Wally nodded slowly. “I’m following...”

Dick looked him dead in the eyes. “Amoral, athiest, atypical, asocial, asexual, acellular, _anonymous_.... what is anonymous supposed to mean, then? Someone who’s not nonymous?”

“...You lost me.”

“What the hell is nonymous, Wally?! If anonymous is a person not identified by name, why doesn’t nonymous mean someone who is?”

“Dude.”

“And this!” Dick continued his tirade, moving his finger further down the page. “Anti! If an antidote is a remedy for a poison, dote should be a synonym for poison, but it’s already a verb. It means to care for someone. So then antidote should mean to not care for someone, but it doesn’t, because it’s already another word. You can dote on someone with an _anti_dote, Wally! English is bullshit!” Dick exclaimed as he slammed the textbook shut and tossed it onto the far side of the couch. A beat of silence passed before he turned his frustration toward Wally. “It’s not funny!”

Caught red handed, or more accurately red faced, Wally burst with the laughter he’d tried so hard to hold in. “It’s not, it’s not, of course it’s not!” he waved his hands in front of his face as if it would distract from the fact that he _clearly_ thought it was. “This is a very serious issue,” Wally coughed into his fist in another vain attempt to cover his ass. “I just think you need to, y’know... stay whelmed.”

Dick, for his part, kept up his facade of unadulterated fury pretty well until Wally finally tried to stop laughing. One second of silence between the two of them, and they both broke out again. Dick leaned against Wally’s side, laughing into his shoulder at his own frustration, shaking with the force of Wally joining in. Wally slung his arm around him, the two of them laughing until it was all out of their systems. When at least he’d calmed down, Dick sighed, pushing his face in against Wally’s collar bone. Wally tried not to shiver when he felt the cold tip of his boyfriend’s nose against the base of his neck. “Okay,” Dick began, “maybe I got a little carried away.”

“It’s cute,” Wally chuckled as he pulled Dick in a little closer against his side. “You get really fired up about this stuff.”

Dick shrugged. “Yeah, well, I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said. A slow sort of silence trickled in, natural at first, until it settled in and neither of them were really sure how to break it - or Wally wasn’t, at least. He looked down at Dick to find his gaze a little distant, staring off into the corner of the room without really seeing anything. Dick licked his lips, blinking himself out of the reverie before finally speaking. “It was a game we used to play. Me and my Dad, between shows.”

Honestly, Wally was so caught off guard by Dick actually talking openly about his family that it took a moment for it too click. However, when it did, everything slid into place. “What, your wordplay thing?”

“Mhm,” Dick hummed under his breath with a nod. He still made no indication that he had any plans to move from his place against Wally’s side. “When I was a kid, they taught me English pretty early on. We mostly toured in the States, so it just sort of came naturally, but I was still just learning. So, my Dad made up this game. We’d give each other words, and we’d have to sort of... I dunno, deconstruct them, make them into something else. Like I’d give him “outstanding”, and ask if “instanding” was a word. If it wasn’t, we’d just... make up a meaning for it. Instanding would mean being average, or not standing out at something you do. But then there’s “to stand out” and “a stand-in”. A stand-in is a replacement for another person or object, so stand-out should mean the original person or object. We’d just go back and forth like that for hours. Even when it was just simple stuff, like the difference between desert versus dessert, loose versus lose....” Dick trained off for a moment, laughing quietly, “Romani versus Romanian...It helped a lot, but it was mostly just fun.”

Wally hung on every syllable that left Dick’s lips. It was so rare for Dick to talk about his life before coming to live with Bruce, that any time he revealed the smallest glimpse, Wally committed it to memory. He laid his head on top of Dick’s, sliding his arm over the back of the couch so he could card his fingers through the back of Dick’s hair. “And... I’m assuming this exam got you thinking a lot about that.”

“Yeah,” Dick breathed. “Guess it did. It’s just...” he stopped, shutting his eyes. “Nevermind, it’s stupid.”

Wally frowned, nudging Dick lightly with his shoulder to coax him into speaking again. “Hey, nothing about this is stupid. What is it?”

Dick resisted for all of two seconds before giving in and opening his eyes again. Still, he couldn’t manage to meet Wally’s eyes. “It’s just,” he continued carefully. “Sometimes I’m worried I’ll forget.”

No clarification needed for that. Wally couldn’t help but deflate a bit, Dick’s palpable despair sinking into him like a needle in a balloon. It knocked the air out of him. He knew he couldn’t imagine what that was like, spending years upon years without speaking his first language, waking up one day struggling to remember the words as his parents said them to him. Wally couldn’t know what that was like, but he felt for Dick. Even if he did mostly grow up in America, even if this was what he’d known for most of his life, there was that core part of him, the part that connected him to his parents, and it was starting to fade away.

Wally knew he couldn’t fix that, but he could damn well try.

“Okay then,” he said, abruptly letting go of Dick and sitting back so he could face him. “How about we make a deal? I’ll keep helping you study for your exam, if you teach me some Romanian.”

A little caught off guard by the sudden change in position, Dick had nearly fallen forward when Wally moved, but caught himself in time to look up at him from beneath his dark fringe. “What, seriously?”

“Seriously,” Wally echoed.

Straightening himself up, Dick regarded Wally with a quirked brow for a long moment before finally shaking his head. “Alright,” he grinned as he folded his legs and faced Wally in return. He thought about it for a moment, bringing up the words from the recess of his memory before speaking, almost a little shy. “Pasăre.”

Wally was so momentarily stunned by hearing Dick speak in his native tongue that he forgot to respond. “Uh, pasăre, cool. What does that mean?” he stammered.

Dick smiled. “It means bird.”

“Okay, awesome. Pasăre means bird,” Wally smiled back. It was almost embarrassing, how _giddy_ this was making him feel. “Teach me more.”

Again, Dick paused to think of a word. “Bliț.”

“Beat?”

“No!” Dick laughed. “You have to say it softer. Like this; bliț,” he repeated, slowing the down into syllables.

Wally furrowed his brow, concentrating harder on replecating the sound. “Blitz?”

“Close enough,” Dick shrugged.

“And what does that mean?”

Dick poked a finger against the centre of Wally’s chest, leaning in a little closer. “Flash.”

“Bitz is Flash, got it,” Wally grinned. “Y’know, Blitz would be a pretty cool Codename. Maybe I should rebrand.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Dick chuckled.

“Fine. Hit me with another one.”

Dick arched a dark brow. He leaned in closer again, moving his finger up from Wally’s chest to curl under his chin. “Prieten,” he said, “is boyfriend.”

Wally swallowed, feeling Dick’s finger move just slightly with his jaw. “Prieten,” he said when he’d regained at least some of his composure. He grinned. “I’m gonna be fluent before you know it at this rate.”

The smirk on Dick’s face as he leaned in even slower, slipping his hand up Wally’s jawline and into his hair, had Wally’s brain short-circuiting. And from the spark in his eyes, Dick knew it. “Saruta-ma,” he whispered.

Wally could only blink. “What... what does that-”

Dick was kissing him before he could get the words out. And y’know what? He found that he didn’t mind at all. Slipping his hands down to Dick’s hips, he leaned back across the cushions, dragging Dick down with him. The crinkle of the papers they were laying on didn’t interrupt them in the slightest, as Wally laid his head back against the arm rest, and Dick made himself comfortable lounging across his body.

“If all our study sessions are gonna end with us making out,” Dick murmured into Wally’s lips, unwilling to break the kiss entirely, “I just might pass this exam.”

Wally smiled against the kiss. In the end though, he was the one to break away, but when he did his smile was even wider. “So if this is making out,” he started, “what does _making in_ mean?”

The look on Dick’s face was beyond priceless. The combined expression of shock, mild horror at what he’d created, and endearment, all too overpowering to settle on his face. With a fit of laughter, Dick collapsed in near hysterics. Wally found himself joining in at just how hard Dick was laughing, arms winding around his waist.

When Dick finally got a hold of himself, he pressed their foreheads together. “_Now_ you’re speaking my language.”

**Author's Note:**

> Some much needed fluff, hope you enjoyed! As a side note, if there's any confusion about my take on Dick's heritage, I explained it all in the end notes for "All Is Fair In Bread And War". Once I get more into detail in other fics, these disclaimers hopefully won't be necessary, but I don't want anyone to get the idea that I've got Romani and Romanian confused in the mean time. I promise I've thought this through lol 
> 
> Comments, as always, are so appreciated. Let me know how you like these shorter pieces, too! Until next time. 
> 
> [「TUMBLR」](https://novaviis.tumblr.com) [「TWITTER」](https://twitter.com/novaviis)


End file.
